Tim Ferriss’ Top 4 Reading Tips
“It’s great! You read a book. So what? How will it affect your behavior or your beliefs or actions?”
I’ve read Tim Ferriss’ bestselling book The 4-Hour Workweek in 2015.
Since then, I’ve been reading his books and blogs, watching his YouTube videos, listening to his podcasts, and learning some of his tips and tricks about anything — one of them is digesting books.
Here, I’ll share some of the best reading tips I’ve learned from Tim.
1. Take structured notes.
“Consuming a ton of information is recreation; It’s not retention,” says Tim.
If you want to make the most out of your reading, take structured notes, even if you’re reading just for fun.
“I read things just for fun, but there is value, even if it’s not obvious at the outset.”
Taking notes helps Tim to:
• Review his book highlights in less than 10 minutes
• Combine his notes into a single theme
• Impose structures on what he learned to boost retention
“Take notes to better structure your thinking, to make better decisions, to have a greater impact on yourself, on those you care about, and on the world in general.”
2. Create an index.
While reading, Tim marks ideas and passages that resonate with him.
Then Tim creates an ‘index’ on the front pages as pointers to ideas that he wants to remember or think more about.
“Information is useful only to the extent that you can find it when needed,” says Tim. “Creating an index for non-fiction books allows me to refer back and review key concepts without rereading the entire book and searching for the underlined sections.”
Tim creates an index in two ways. The first way is writing page numbers with brief descriptions of what type of information you will find there.
The second way is writing “ph” somewhere on the front page, and then underneath that, he writes all the phrases he finds interesting, the wordsmithing he finds beautiful, or just the page numbers.
3. Take multiple passes with your index.
The key to Tim’s note-taking system is performing multiple passes, where he constantly asks himself:
‘What do I think is important or cool?’
“A day later or a week later, I will go through and ‘star’ a few entries on my index, and a week later, I’ll circle or box or highlight. In that way, I’m able to identify which chapters, which techniques I have found most useful repeatedly.”
For example, Tim wants to remind himself that overnight success is rare, so he boxed and highlighted these notes:
“Seinfield took 4 years to find audience”
“Mad Men turned down by 66 buyers”
“I highlighted these, meaning they made three passes,” he said.
Taking multiple passes lets you distill the best of the best of what you’ve learned, leaving out ideas that seem incredibly striking at first but later prove to not be useful.
“After taking multiple passes on the highlights, I can review the salient points in terms of lessons and actions in a few minutes… Might be a 5 to 10-minute review of a book that took me 5 to 10 hours to read.”
4. Create a “next action list”.
Tim doesn’t just devour knowledge. He hunts for action steps to implement. After compiling the index, after starring and circling the best stuff, he creates a ‘next action list’.
“It’s great! You read a book. So what? How will it affect your behavior or your beliefs or actions?”
At the bottom right corner of the page, Tim creates a box with possible next actions. “So they don’t get lost in all of the various notes, especially when I’m taking tons of them.”
In the photo above, Tim listed his next action steps (after performing multiple passes on his notes) to copy and paste the best ideas into a different field or context.
“This book (In Pursuit of the Common Good), even though seemingly unrelated, helped me to fundraise 8 million dollars (out of 17 million) for the first dedicated psychedelic and consciousness research center at Johns Hopkins.”
The project was later featured on the cover of The New York Times — and it all started from a humble box of ‘next action list’.
“I love reading, but more than just reading. I love reading with real behavioral change afterward.”
Thanks for reading!
